Something Rotten in the State of Education: DAY 21

Today I’ve heard on separate occasions from a parent and a teacher respectively sharing their perspective from within their own current situation regarding the state of the education system and themselves in it. Both were tragic tales but from opposite sides of the education continuum. The parent felt that her child since starting school had become withdrawn and competitive and even that the child had lost confidence in himself. She explained how through the eyes of the child, the teachers are instigating competition through playing favors with specific children. She also explained how she had tried to voice this to the school, but were met only with the blame being placed on the child. The teacher’s perspective was one of feeling that teaching is an ungrateful profession, that the things teachers have to put up with from kids is nearly unbearable and he asked me if I know what teachers have to go through each day. I do know and I do understand how tough a job it can be to be a teacher. As I’ve mentioned previously this is exactly why I didn’t wanted to become a teacher, because I could see how exhausted and worn out many teachers become.

Our educational systems are in a rotten state to say the least.

We have parents and teachers feeling absolutely powerless towards the situation they’re in. Parents often have little choice as to which school they send their child to and even less influence over what goes on in the classroom, let alone the courtyard of your local public school. Teachers are forced to follow curricular that they have had no influence in developing, written out by people who have never said foot in a public school classroom and whose main concern is the next term’s election. Teachers are paid a low wage and are hardly given any time to prepare for their classes, let alone receive any form of support or supervision from their peers. Parents blame teachers for not being attentive enough or caring enough. Teachers blame parents for not sufficiently disciplining their children to behave in school.

However – there is a different side of the story: the children’s side.

And then there is the side of the story where the solution to solving this problem lays, not in parents or teachers blaming each other, but in each group taking self-responsibility for their role in the current education system. Children barely have a voice. This is due to the fact of their status in society as literally being parents’ (and to some extent teachers’) ‘property’ that they can do with and ‘raise’ as they please. And children do become grown-ups. I mean they grow up, but are they really raised? Wouldn’t being raised imply that children are supported to become and be their utmost potential in this world? Caring, considerate, respectful human beings with confidence and integrity? Children also don’t have a voice because it perhaps isn’t as easy for them to express themselves – often they don’t have the vocabulary required to make their voice heard and be taken seriously. This doesn’t mean that they don’t see, that they don’t hear or that they don’t feel the effects of the current education system on their minds and bodies.

As I’ve mentioned previously, seeing a child transitioning from kindergarten to school is often literally like seeing a light going out. It is a tragedy. Children come into this world full of life, embracing the world and other people absolutely unconditionally with curiosity and genuineness and child after child entering into the school system, they are broken down in innumerable ways until nothing is left but a flicker of the potential of what the child could have become, had it had adults around it that understood and cared and honored the life of the child enough to actually provide it with an educational environment that supports the child to grow and develop to its utmost potential.

And this is what we call our education system – this is what we accept as normal.

On one hand we have the teacher who has become bitter and spiteful and who feels powerless and who pities himself against the image of a horde of obnoxious students. On the other hand we have the parent that feels completely powerless towards teaching her son values that truly matter in life and see him slowly slip out of her hands and into the world of brutal competition, lies and deceit. And this is in no way to saying that ’teachers are bad and parents are good’ or to judge either group – because at the end of the day parents and teachers are equally responsible – along with everyone else, for the current state of the education system.

It is absolutely unacceptable that we’re accepting an education system where we have teachers who hate to teach and students who hate going to school. It is absolutely unacceptable that education is seen as a production facility for the competitive ability of a nation on a global financial market. It is absolutely unacceptable that we as parents and teachers blame each other as well as the system AND our kids while we do absolutely nothing to change the situation. I mean, don’t we realize that what we’re creating through the education system, is the future of our world – literally?

Parents feel powerless, teachers feel powerless, children feel powerless – but we can’t just leave it at that and then go on our merry way, because as we’ve all noticed: the way we’re currently living on this planet is not very merry.

The solution is simple yet requires all of us to make perhaps the most difficult decision of our lives: to realize that we are each co-responsible and self-responsible for the state the world is currently in and to through that realization allocate ourselves and how we are contributing to safeguarding the status quo of the world. For most of us it is the very fact that we’ve abdicated all responsibilities to government organs that doesn’t in fact support our best interests because these organs are now entirely embedded within a corporate rule that is slowly but surely laying the earth barren and destroyed. In many countries we have implemented democratic systems but these systems are rather ‘consumer-democracies’ than actual democracies where each of us partake in voting for causes and values that have a substantial impact on our lives – causes as for example education and values such as the equality of all beings. As such neither teachers, parents nor children stand a chance of a different education system, a system that we’d all like to wake up and go to – if we don’t take co-responsibility – and self-responsibility for changing the entire world system as it currently exists.

This is exactly what we’re doing at the Equal Life Foundation working towards Real ACTUAL Human Rights and with the Equal Money Movement, researching ways to implement a system of equality where all supports each other in living the best possible life and at Desteni and with the Desteni I Process where we take individual responsibility to face and change ourselves and educate ourselves so that we can stand in and with the world-systems in equality and direct them to become living systems that supports what is best for all life. Whatever else happens – we decide.